Manuel Felguérez

Manuel Felguérez Barra (December 12, 1928 – June 8, 2020) was a Mexican abstract artist, part of the Generación de la Ruptura that broke with the muralist movement of Diego Rivera and others in the mid 20th century.

Early life Felguérez was born in the state of Zacatecas in 1928, but political instability caused his family to lose their land there and move to Mexico City. In 1947, he had the chance to travel to Europe and, impressed with the art there, decided to dedicate himself to the vocation. Unhappy with the education at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico, he did most of his studies in France, where he specialized in abstract art (which was not accepted in Mexico at the time). His exhibitions were initially limited to galleries and the production of "sculpted murals" using materials such as scrap metals, stones, and sand. As attitudes in Mexico changed towards art, Felguérez found acceptance for his work and remained active at over eighty years of age.

Manuel Felguérez was born on his family's San Agustín del Vergel hacienda near Valparaíso, Zacatecas, on December 12, 1928. It was a turbulent time as Zacatecas was involved in the Cristero uprising and while the fighting initially began over religion, it quickly became about land as well. His father owned the family hacienda, the great-great-grandson of landholders, but by the early 20th century, these landowners were despised by the general populace.

Some of the hacienda's workers demanded control of the land by force, with battles between loyalists and the insurgents occurring on the property. His intention was to go with Ibarguengoitia for a jamboree, but the trip cost 5,000 pesos which he could not pay. The two found cheaper passage and got to France on their own, angering the Mexican Scout leadership, who expelled them. They then decided to hitchhike around various countries including Italy, Switzerland, France, and England, staying at houses of Scouting contacts and visiting museums.

He entered the Academy of San Carlos in 1948, but lasted only four months, as he did not like its conformity with the dominant artistic movement in Mexico at that time, Escuela Mexicana de Pintura.

He returned to Mexico in 1950 for family reasons, and he studied through 1954 for a bachelor's degree in anthropology and history, while also taking classes in modern art at Mascarones and studying the craft of terracotta at La Esmeralda with Francisco Zúñiga. He met his first wife, Ruth Rohde in 1951. Their families would not let them marry so they eloped. To appease the families, they later married again in a Catholic church. He tried to sell sculptures made in his workshop without success, but he did make some money by designing lamps for Enrique Anhalt. He and his wife moved to Puerto Escondido and had a store selling handcrafts. retiring after thirty years, and never depended on art sales to live. He stated that it was hard for him to sell his work and sometimes large quantities of pieces could accumulate without sale. He had homes in Colorado and the Olivar de los Padres neighborhood of Mexico City, He died from COVID-19 during the COVID-19 pandemic in Mexico on June 8, 2020, at the age of 91. Most of these were done early in his career with thirty relief murals using materials such as scrap metal, stones, sand and shells finished by the end of the 1960s. Some of the more important works of this type are at the Diana Theater and the Bahía water park.

In the late 1950s and during the 1960s, abstract art was not accepted by Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura and Felguérez was mostly limited to exhibiting in galleries. His first individual exhibition was in 1958. For the Bicentennial of Mexico's Independence, Felguérez's mural "Ecuación en Acero" (Equation in Steel) was inaugurated by the same president at the Secretariat of Public Education. In 2011, 'Manuel Felguérez: Gráfica y Escultura' exhibited at the Centro Nacional de las Artes (Cenart). In the same year, Estética de lo real: Caos y orden de la obra de Manuel Felguérez" was presented at the Museo de Aguascalientes.

In his eighties, he still spent eight hours a day experimenting and working on his art as well as traveling for exhibitions. He also used computers to program designs, experimenting with them as a new medium.

Felguérez ventured into digital art by becoming a teacher at the Ibero-American university, at that time there were only three computers in Mexico, one in the IMSS and another at the UNAM, only one open to the student body in general; there he managed to work once a week for an hour and started experimenting with geometry.

Later he obtained a Guggenheim scholarship and served as a guest researcher at Harvard, where he had his own computer, the results of his experimentation were published in a book called "multiple space", which gave him the status of being a pioneer in digital art in Mexico.

In this work, the author created an artist-computer link, creating a "prototype of artificial intelligence", a computer with sensitive decisions, based on the information provided by the user, certain specific aesthetic criteria (shapes, measurements, colors), so that the machine generated several possible compositions.

Artistry

The formation of Felguérez's style and imagery is closely tied to the various movements of Europe such as incorporating geometric-constructivist, informalism and abstract expressionism which he was exposed to in his early training. He melded these elements into his own style. In 1975 after obtaining a scholarship from the Guggenheim Foundation which allowed him to do research at Harvard University, he started experimenting with computers aided by the computer science engineer Mayer Sasson The permanent collection contains about 100 works by the artists that represent his development over his long career as well as over 110 pieces by Mexican and international abstract artists. The initial donation was from Felguérez's own private collection and given to the museum on the condition that it would be dedicated to the abstract art of his generation and those thereafter.